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At its TIFF premiere, Bad Apples showed its core: not the child locked away, but the rot spreading through the adults around him. The audience laughed at every crisp comic beat, applauding the film’s willingness to turn moral collapse into comedy
This was remarkable, given the subject: a teacher who, in a moment of desperation, locks an unruly child in her basement. The success lay in Jonatan Etzler’s direction, Saoirse Ronan’s precision, and the comic instinct of a newcomer who stole whole stretches of the film. Every smirk or twitch from Nia Brown’s Pauline drew laughter at TIFF, proof that this satire works not by shocking into silence but by seducing into complicity.
Adapted from Rasmus Lindgren’s novel De Oönskade, Bad Apples begins with Maria (Saoirse Ronan), a primary school teacher at the end of her rope. One child destabilises her classroom to the point of collapse and, in a moment of madness, she removes the problem entirely, taking the child home and locking them away. What follows is an experiment in utilitarianism: with the disruption gone, the class blossoms, parents beam, colleagues praise her. Maria tastes the “greater good,” if only she can ignore the cost.
It is a premise designed to be appalling. But Etzler plays it for comedy, making the audience complicit. At TIFF, they laughed at the jokes, at the children, at Ronan’s exasperation and, most of all, at Pauline’s anarchic presence. The film pushes viewers toward Maria’s own rationalisation: isn’t life easier when the bad apple is gone?
However, while the phrase “bad apples” may appear to point at the child, the disruptive one whose removal allows order to return, the film inverts the metaphor. The rot is not in the child but in the adults. It’s in Maria’s desperation, in the parents’ complicity, in the staff’s silence, in what society is willing to accept as necessary sacrifice. The bad apples are those who rationalise cruelty for convenience. The more the system appears to function, the more the apple rots.
Etzler has argued that his films are realism even when people call them heightened. His point is that humans are “weird as hell” when looked at closely. Bad Apples demonstrates this: its realism is absurd; its comedy grounded in how people truly behave when cornered. What is striking is how little guilt the laughter carries. At TIFF, the audience did not wince or pull back. They laughed openly, then applauded. The discomfort comes later, on reflection, when one realises the moral weight of what had seemed so funny in the room. This is the film’s rare achievement: it creates relief through laughter without remorse, even while confronting an almost impossible subject.
Saoirse Ronan anchors the film with a performance that is, in a word, monstrous. She is sympathetic, magnetic, and disturbingly funny and a teacher we recognise, a woman on the edge, a moral collapse made human. Her timing ensures that Maria is never simply tragic but consistently watchable, even when she is appalling.
The revelation is Nia Brown as Pauline. So comedically gifted that even a smirk drew laughter at TIFF, she electrifies the film every time she appears. Pauline embodies the film’s argument: disruption can be joyous, necessary, even life-giving. By laughing at her, we are made complicit in wanting her removed. Brown’s instinctive timing ensures the satire lands not as cruelty but as irresistible humour.
Eddie Waller, in his debut as the locked-away child, haunts the film by absence. Jacob Anderson, Rakie Ayola, Robert Emms, and Sean Gilder fill the adult world with shades of complicity, reinforcing the theme that the rot lies not in children but in the compromises of their elders.
Etzler’s film echoes Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, where a perfect society depends on the hidden suffering of one child. Here, the suffering is not hidden but plain, and yet no one truly looks. The parents accept, the school accepts, and the audience, laughing along, accepts too.
Visually, these themes are reinforced through recurring motifs of boxes and squares, classrooms, apartments, an Amazon package, the basement, all symbols of order, structure, and confinement. Nea Harnebrandt Asphäll’s cinematography sharpens these lines, while Jacqueline Abrahams’ production design and Sarah Blenkinsop’s costumes extend the geometry into every detail. Chris Roe’s score ties it together with playful menace, undercutting the tension with sly humour.
The spirit of Roald Dahl hovers over the film in the grotesque humour, the mischievous delight in children as agents of chaos, and the way cruelty can be played monstrously funny without tipping into horror. Bad Apples shares that sensibility, daring to be wickedly entertaining about subjects usually left untouched. Like Dahl at his sharpest, it makes the laughter feel dangerous but also refreshing, as though some taboo has been broken open.
Ultimately, theory is secondary to how a film plays. At TIFF, Bad Apples landed. It was funny in the room, consistently so, and the applause at the end was full. That the laughter came easily is not a weakness but the point. This is a film about complicity, about the ease with which we accept cruelty if it makes life smoother. The audience’s laughter was not evidence against the film but proof that it works.
Bad Apples is brave, original, and refreshing. A dark comedy that takes an almost impossible subject and makes it not only laughable but irresistibly so. Ronan is monstrous, magnetic, and disturbingly funny. Nia Brown, in her breakout role, proves herself so comedically gifted that even a smirk could set off a room. Together with Etzler’s sharp direction, they achieve something rare, a satire that is monstrously funny, Dahl-like in its mischief, and a scalpel to the quiet compromises of adulthood.
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